July 28th, 20180NEW YORK— An Arab American immigrant will play a leading role in the upcoming CBS series “FBI”, created by Dick Wolf — best known for the “Law and Order” franchise.
Zeeko Zaki, who plays Agent Omar Adom Zidan in the show, emigrated from Egypt at just 1 month old in 1990. He grew up primarily outside of Philadelphia in...
July 16th, 20181DEARBORN ― U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Dearborn) has come under fire for implying during an interview with HuffPost at a rally in Ann Arbor on Saturday that gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed is less likely to win the election because he's a Muslim.
Dingell is backing Gretchen Whitmer, a former Michigan Senate minority...
June 24th, 20181DENVER — When Craig Caldwell wanted to sublet a space to a Muslim restaurant owner, his landlord turned the deal down. He was so shocked at the reason she gave that he used his cell phone to record two conversations with her.
His landlord said find an "American person", according to the recordings.
The recordings, which are part...
June 10th, 20180
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota — The run-up to Amazon Prime Day, the e-commerce giant’s big July sales promotion, overlaps with Ramadan, 30 sacred days during which many observant Muslims fast and seek time off.
That’s creating tension in Minnesota’s Twin Cities region, where activists say Amazon.com Inc. employs more than...
June 8th, 20180SAINT AUGUSTINE, Fla - A Florida man was arrested on Wednesday after he reportedly attacked two men he believed to be Muslims or Middle Easterners. He used a stun gun and told them they didn’t “deserve to eat American food".
John Jay Smith, 60, got into a verbal altercation with the men before menacing them with a knife and...
June 5th, 20180WASHINGTON, D.C. — Congressman Dan Kildee (D-Flint), along with his congressional staff in Washington, D.C., will fast in solidarity Wednesday with Muslims in Michigan and around the world in observance of Ramadan. Ramadan is a holy month of fasting during which Muslims may not eat or drink from sunrise to sunset.
This will be the...
May 25th, 20182The United States’ first iftar took place at the home of the third president.
In 1805, the month of Ramadan fell in December. Far from his friends, family and home, one Tunisian man was attempting to observe it in Washington, D.C. This was the statesman Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, who was spending six months in the United States, on...
May 25th, 20180By Sarah Kominek
DEARBORN— During the holy month of Ramadan, merchants and community organizations in Dearborn are motivated to be charitable, but they also help the less fortunate throughout the year.
Local merchants deal with the infrequent occurrence of begging, which happens year round, not just during Ramadan.
Danya Saed,...
April 13th, 20180NEW YORK CITY — Last Thursday, a group of Muslim owned-businesses, mosques, individuals, and student groups reached a settlement with the New York Police Department (NYPD) in a federal lawsuit challenging the discriminatory surveillance of American Muslims in New Jersey.
Filed in 2012 in federal court in New Jersey, in Hassan v....
April 6th, 20180An emergency room nurse and two administrators at Beaumont in Dearborn told The AANews they had not heard about the incident or received any notification from the hospital until after the lawsuit was filed.
DEARBORN – She went to the ER for a possible broken jaw and was punched in the face.
A 19-year-old college student was...
March 30th, 20180BEIRUT — A Muslim cleric has been expelled from his seminary in Lebanon after a video of his piano playing, posted online, drew criticism from conservatives who felt it was undignified behavior for a man of the cloth, he said.
Shi'a Muslim Sayed Hussein al-Husseini, 38, a keen pianist and amateur poet, posted the footage to...
March 22nd, 20180NEW YORK – Muslim-Jewish relations are thought to be in conflict. However a study shows that followers of both faiths are more closely aligned with one another, expect on the issue of Jerusalem.
The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding (FFEU) released a study that provides a national benchmark measuring opinions and behaviors of...
December 22nd, 20172DEARBORN — An Arab American attorney, Majed Moughni, has dropped his lawsuit against Little Caesars after receiving racists threats directed towards him and his family on social media.
Moughni had filed the suits earlier this year, at the beginning of Ramadan, when he alleged that Little Caesar's had been falsely advertising the...
December 15th, 20170JERUSALEM — Nazareth, the Arab city occupied by Israelis, where Jesus is thought to have been raised, has canceled some Christmas celebrations in protest of President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, an official said.
Trump announced the move to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel last week, reversing...
October 18th, 20170FAIRFAX, VA - A man is facing the death penalty after he was charged with raping and murdering a Muslim teenager as she was heading to a mosque with friends.
Darwin Torres, 22, attacked 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen and a group of her friends in Sterling, Virginia, after they had eaten a meal together following a day-long fast during...
October 6th, 20171DEARBORN — A U of M-Dearborn campus officer approached him outside an event hall and began aggressively and suspiciously questioning why he, a White American, was outside a majority-Arab and Muslim event.
"I had just gotten a haircut, so I looked like a fresh Nazi," he said. "I had a camo shirt and I was pacing outside of this...
September 14th, 20170DEARBORN—The Arab American National Museum (AANM) hosted a town hall on September 8 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Japanese American detainment in internment camps and the 16th anniversary of the September 11 World Trade Center attacks in New York City.
In 1942, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, which entailed...
September 3rd, 20170NOVI — On August 8, a Muslim family was accosted in the parking lot of Twelve Oaks Mall by a White man in his 30s who hurled epithets and derogatory slurs at them. The mother, out of fear for her two children, called the Novi Police Department.
After driving past the family, the assailant parked his car and approached the family...
September 3rd, 20171BERKELEY, CA — The Islamic Scholarship Fund (ISF) was founded in 2009 in response to the low number of Muslims in media and policy fields. ISF provides funding and mentorship to its awardees.
Before ISF was launched, Dr. Hamid Rezapour, the founder and president, was frustrated by the negative depictions of Islam and Muslims in the...
July 21st, 20170HAMTRAMCK — When the voters of Hamtramck elected four Muslims to the City Council in 2015, it made headlines nationally and internationally on media outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, CNN, Fox News and more as a seemingly oxymoronic move in an "American city"— as if those public officials' Islamic faith...
July 14th, 20176HAMTRAMCK — In 2015, Hamtramck became the first city in the United States to elect a Muslim majority to its city council. While many right wing pundits charged that the council would enact Sharia (Islamic law) at its first opportunity, the contrary occurred.
When Acting City Manager Katrina Powell's two and a half year contract...
July 14th, 20170HAMTRAMCK — As Michiganders mull over who to elect or reelect to various government positions, a town with a growing Arab American population is also preparing for the upcoming elections.
Hamtramck is facing shifting demographics, reflecting that of its neighbors, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights. It's also where an unprecedented...
July 7th, 20170By Afaf Humayun
DETROIT — Since 2013, the Detroit-based company LaunchGood has been providing the international Muslim community with a unique way to reclaim its narrative through charitable online giving.
"There is so much misinformation about Muslims and Arabs out there that it's a way for us to take things into our own hands,"...
June 30th, 20170LANSING — On election night last November, Dearbornites celebrated a triumph. Abdullah Hammoud, 27, became the first Arab Muslim male to represent the city in the state legislature.
He told The AANews he felt relieved to win the race, but knew that struggle still lay ahead because "Trump might win Michigan."
Donald Trump not only...
May 28th, 20170 WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has declined a request to host an event to mark Islam's holy month of Ramadan, two U.S. officials said, apparently breaking with a bipartisan tradition in place with few exceptions for nearly 20 years.
Since 1999, Republican and Democratic secretaries of state have nearly always hosted...
May 19th, 20172NEW YORK — At a Roman Catholic high school in New York's Long Island suburbs, two dozen visiting Muslim students knelt and prayed while teens in uniform blazers from the host school looked on.
The trip's agenda was simple: give students whose schools are just 10 miles apart but culturally worlds away a chance to get to know each...
May 12th, 20170DEARBORN — A lack of language for gay identity in religious doctrine reflected the stigmatization and eventual pathologization of it in Western discourse, where homosexuality was recognized as a mental illness from the 19th century until its removal from the DSM in 1973.
Ironically, Arabic and Islamic-era words articulating...
May 12th, 20171
DEARBORN — In March, Dearborn native Maysaa Ouza, 24, applied to the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG) only to find herself making history as the first Muslim hijabi to become a judge advocate.
A judge advocate practices law in the Air Force differently than in the private sector. Ouza will be able to...
